This article concentrates on Twittering authors, instead of the much more dignified, practical, and, frankly, important list at the Huffington Post, but it still offers a view of what it’s like to follow a bunch of crazy author types through the ingredients of the lunchtime sandwich preparation. You can follow Bookninja on Twitter here. You know you want to.

The majority of the authors on Twitter are the real thing. Like the social media enthusiast Alain de Botton (28,667 followers). He sends you a personal message when you follow him – which feels both creepy and flattering at the same time. He combines self-publicity – “Peter Mandelson picks my book, along with a travel guide to Corfu, among [his] favourite books” – with philosophical sound bites: “Most great problems have no solutions, beyond the relief to be had in sharing and analysing them.”

But there is a lot of tomfoolery on Twitter, too. One delight is to follow both the real Alain and the fake one, his impersonator Alan de Bottom (“philosophicator… I am nothing without Alain”) whose subversive takes on the original’s aphorisms have a pithy wit of their own: “You have to have quite a lot of friends and even more acquaintances before it becomes acceptable to say you are lonely, said Eleanor Rigby.”

There are usually obvious clues if an author seems too good to be true. Shakespeare yields dozens of results, some lunatic. There are 17 tweeting Ernest Hemingways (including @ZombieHemingway), 14 Samuel Pepyses and Raymond Chandlers, and at least three Martin Amis impersonators. The most convincing Amis, with 2,155 (duped?) followers, lists his location winsomely as “London. Always London.” He recently tweeted: “Natasha Walter – I’d give her one. It’s the way her mouth says ‘misogynist objectification’. It’s a soft, wide rosebud, wanton yet yielding.” And: “Why oh why is my editor so pendantic?” (sic). Does anyone believe the real Martin Amis would put this stuff out there? Still, it’s a tribute of sorts.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Flotsam? Ang Lee directing 3D Life of Pi, James Cameron all, “like, whatever”.

According to Thompson on Hollywood, the producers are projecting a $70 million for “a 3-D magical fantasy adventure crammed with visual effects.” The screenplay was written by David Magee–who wrote another sort of adaptation with Finding Neverland.

According to this Bookseller piece, fiction is driving Amazon in the first quarter. Happy days are here again? Somebody bring me bring me two fried condor eggs, a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite, and some non-fiction writer’s skull to use as a cup!

Book sales at Amazon.co.uk remain “strong”, with fiction purchases managing to more than offset any dip in non-fiction, according to its director of books.

Gordon Willoughby was speaking after Amazon.com revealed international sales increased by 45% to $3.35bn (£2.2bn) and worldwide media sales rose 26%,in the three months to 31st March.

Worldwide media sales, including books, rose to $3.43bn. Operating income for the worldwide business jumped 62% to $394m.  Willoughby said fiction was the key performer for the retailer during the quarter, identifying Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and the “strong” genre of vampire fiction.

I’m headed off to Labrador tomorrow for two nights in sunny Goose Bay, known locally as “The Goose”. I’m reasonably sure I’ll have access to get online, but in case I don’t, I’ll see you Monday.

China Miéville wins Clarke Award, tosses over shoulder onto pile

Waterstone’s turn-around?

Another ebook distributor

McGraw-Hill to offer customizable ebooks

Remember how Seinfeld’s daughter wife had been sued for “copying” the idea of a cookbook that hid healthy food in fun toddlerfill for kids? Court says she didn’t

Heather Reisman, pictured here wearing pearls and what appears to be a blouse made entirely of dead pandas, is interviewed ostensibly around Kobo (which from the sounds of it, is actually the better platform, at least software-wise), but actually around Amazon being allowed to do what she got shafted on back in the 90s (and presumably enabled her apparent abiding hatred of bookselling in Canada that’s since driven her to cripple the brick and mortar industry and change it over to a serious of homogenous department stores selling cheap plastic shit). Her newsflash: she no longer has any intention of selling Chindigo. I guess her work here is not done. Don’t go into the light, Head!

Q: Now that Amazon will be allowed to have its own distribution centre here, do you believe Ottawa should ease foreign ownership legislation in a way that would allow you to enter into international partnerships?

A: Amazon had a full-on distribution centre here before, but it was run by Canada Post. The change is they are going to run it themselves. In my opinion, once the government [in 2002] allowed Amazon to operate 100% as a major bookseller in Canada with no Canadian ownership, they were de facto saying that they believe in this day and age that you do not have to be Canadian to own a book-retailing company [in Canada].

Q: Do you intend to take that issue up with Industry Canada? How is it that Kobo can have international partners with a substantial stake?

A: I don’t have any reason to take it up because I am not looking at selling the Indigo business. Our Kobo business is a global business. But I think the government realizes that you cannot put legislation on a digital business – what are you going to do? You just can’t.

In my day job role as an executive director of a not-for-profit agency, I can assure you, post morning-long rubber-glove-treatment*, that the spending of public funds (by arts organizations, at least) is being guarded with the highest level of scrutiny and accountability, and absolutely no KY Jelly. And they totally leave their watch on.

LBF 0ffers discount for next year, presuming Denmark doesn’t spontaneously go biblical upwind…

Charles Simic dishes on the post of US Poet Laureate (do we even HAVE a laureate any more? I haven’t heard a peep…)

Marilyn Monroe writings to be published, but not on novelty thong

UK election (and rise of, you know, fundamental extremism) good news for booming manifesto book market

On MJ’s Thriller and poetry….

Charlie Brown and gang sold into human slavery for mere $175M (but that’s US dollars, which are worthless these days compared to our loony… das right, ese, “loony”… Like, you even LOOK over at this side of the cell we’ll get parity LOCO on yo ass….)

On “recycling” books

Tintin on trial, presumably for necrophilia, but that’s just a theory of mine

Moby launches its own award for book trailers

NLer Jessica Grant wins Amazon First Novel Award

*Called a “monitor” in NFP parlance, which basically means “brutal violation”.

Go to your local library and check out some groceries today!

The Virtual Supermarket Project is part of a city push to make healthy food more accessible in communities where major supermarkets are scarce. Baltimore’s health department launched it last month at two of the city’s public library branches. They’re located on opposite ends of town: one neighborhood is mostly African-American and working-class, the other racially and economically mixed.

These areas lack large, competitively priced supermarkets within walking distance — sometimes called “food deserts.” Both communities have plenty of fast-food and corner stores, but many tend to offer less healthy fare.

“In Baltimore, where we’re working at with the libraries, you see that the mortality burden from diet-related causes like diabetes, stroke and heart disease are among the highest in the city,” says Ryan Petteway, a city epidemiologist.

A new website exploring options for experiment in publishing called the Literary Platform gets a short profile at the Bookseller. I like it when people get together and hash things out. From the About page:

The Literary Platform is dedicated to showcasing projects experimenting with literature and technology. It brings together comment from industry figures and key thinkers, and encourages debate.

If you love books, you’ll have noticed a surge of interest from publishers, literary agents, literary magazines, writers and developers in bringing the traditional book format to new platforms.

With a few pioneering projects taking centre stage and major publishers trying to quickly stake out ground, The Literary Platform serves to showcase the range of creative literary initiatives being launched in this important area.

The key word circulating in book publishing at the moment is ‘experiment’. The showcase will demonstrate how traditional publishers and developers are experimenting with multimedia formats, how established authors are going it alone, how first-time novelists are bypassing publishers and how niche literary magazines are finding wider audiences.

Translators don’t get nearly enough attention and/or love in our literary world, so I suggest you find and hug one today. If you can’t find one, hug me and I’ll pass it one when I see them. (Lie! I’m keeping all hugs!) Then send them to this article in the Guardian. Then over to Michael’s place, where he is always handing out the translator love (proper thing).

You’ll never know exactly what a translator has done. He reads with maniacal attention to nuance and cultural implication, conscious of all the books that stand behind this one; then he sets out to rewrite this impossibly complex thing in his own language, re-elaborating everything, changing everything in order that it remain the same, or as close as possible to his experience of the original. In every sentence the most loyal respect must combine with the most resourceful inventiveness. Imagine shifting the Tower of Pisa into downtown Manhattan and convincing everyone it’s in the right place; that’s the scale of the task. Writing my own novels has always required a huge effort of organisation and imagination; but, sentence by sentence, translation is intellectually more taxing. On the positive side, the hands-on experience of how another writer puts together his work is worth a year’s creative writing classes. It is a loss that few writers “stoop” to translation these days.

In which rusteth the freon- and news-leaking freezer that poisons informations groundwater.

LCD vs. e-ink… no difference for your eyes

Does Twitter sell books or do books increase follows?

Games come to Nook making the book platform more attractive… to… non… book… people? Grrrrreeeeaaaat…?

Sillitoe’s last interview

Peter Carey profiled in NYT

Under the volcano — can publishers survive the Bjorkano? Children’s publishers worried too

Why Archie’s gay character matters

Fan Incredibly Disappointed to Learn Player’s Favorite Book is the Bible

Ian McEwan up for comedy award

From midlist to giant print run… and all it took was a Pulitzer

Jones and Le win PEN short story awards

HTML Giant has a great, funny piece explaining all those, occasionally confusing, editor titles you see on the masthead of your magazines. Very well done and a good laugh.

Editor – this guy (sorry, I imagine a dude) doesn’t read submissions; he might not even read the journal when it comes out. He just calls his friends on the phone to solicit their writing. He likes to say “I split my time between New York and [some other city].” This guy is famous and he rocks.

Executive Editor – this guy is old, and went to Princeton in the 50s. He doesn’t have an email account; doesn’t even know what twitter is. He just goes to the bank and transfers money and writes checks. He lives by a lake, but cannot swim.

Poet Jacob Mooney started this thing at the Torontoist books site called the Optimisms Project, in which he asked young poets to riff on why they are, well, optimistic about the future of poetry. Unbeknownst to the readership, he also asked a few, as he then referred to us in all our disgusting, aged glory, “older” poets to participate as well. Erin Moure,  yours truly, and Sina Queyras have all now done it, revealing our Pollyanna souls for ridicule, despite our better judgement. Mine is, initially, perhaps not as earnest as one might like, but what do you expect? I’m old. With Poetry Month coming to a close, I thought it was time to take a retrospective look. Turns out there are some smart kids out there. Go look.

No, not what’s written by Mme Atwood on her Frankenhand Device, but rather neologisms jammed together from pieces of dismembered words like some creepy cybernetic geisha experiment in a Japanese gore flick. Except, you know, without stabbing someone’s eyes out with fried tempura. A small army of disgusted, likely virginal, linguists are in a constant state of lexicological apoplexy over this (lexoplexy?), but there’s no stopping the twin wheels of human inventiveness and laziness (invaziness?)

Moby has turned its caustic eye of doom-linkage on Figes and what it sees isn’t pretty. The man of a thousand sockpuppets finds he can’t darn the damage caused by his dishonesty and now, with his hand exposed and well-knit career unravelling, his supporters seem to have cold feet, and his luck seems to have run out—barefoot.  (Take that, restrained-metaphor!)

The British press this weekend was awash in reports that he could face multiple lawsuits and that his academic position may be in jeopardy, as well as with second looks into numerous past charges of plagiarism that journalists and historians now say Figes suppressed by constantly threatening expensive lawsuits.

“He now faces legal action from at least two of the authors he wrote about” in his Amazon reviews, according to a Saturday Daily Telegraph report. “There have been some large legal costs built up in the last week which I hope to retrieve from the Figes family,” Rachel Polonsky tells the paper. The Telegraph also notes that “Dr Polonsky said she would offer legal help to Prof [Robert] Service, the historian who initially sent an email to a dozen historians about the anonymous reviews. He was threatened with libel proceedings by Figes’s laywer.”

Ex-pat Australian poet Porter, dead at 81.

”He was one of the two or three great heirs of W.H. Auden,” Malouf told the Herald yesterday. ”He was absolutely a poet whose context was international.”

Malouf also comes from Brisbane, but discovered their shared background only when he met Porter in 1961.

”He established himself immediately in London as one of the most engaging voices in the group of poets known as the Group. He wrote clever, irreverent and often satirical verse that was partly to do with his Australian background and partly the deep melancholy that was in his poetry from the beginning.”

“Angry” “young” 50s author Sillitoe, dead at 82.

Ah, digging in the dirt. Michael Ignatieff, sadly our best choice for ever getting rid of that beady-eyed Captain of Religious Industry, Stephen Harper, is under fire because his publisher creatively manipulated some review copy to use as jacket blurb. The horrors! The common, every-day horrors! But still…

Take this snippet from the National Post: “Plenty of scope for a rich story … Some wonderful anecdotes, particularly about George P. Grant … Well written.”

In fact, the Post review in its entirety was far from laudatory.

“True Patriot Love offers little that is new on the Grants save some wonderful anecdotes, particularly about George P. Grant,” wrote reviewer Robert L. Fraser.

“As an exploration of patriotism, it offers up clichés about modern Canada but little more.True Patriot Love is a well-written disappointment.”

Such selective and misleading editing for purposes of book jacket hype is common practice in the publishing industry.

But on Friday, Conservative MPs called the book blurbs “dishonest” and said that in Ignatieff’s case, they were evidence of his unfitness for political office.

I know this is more about the mafia-like crush on power the Conservatives are desperate to keep and will therefore sink to any level to attempt to destroy others, but it’s a good chance to talk about the jacket review blurb as a space in which morality can get naked and frolic for all to see. Is it acceptable to bend reviews around corners? I reviewed Dave Eggers’ first, HBWSG, back in 2000 and gave it a good, but reserved, review in the Globe and Mail. I was living in New York at the time and wandered in to Three Lives a year later and found a copy of the paperback. When I casually flipped through, I found my review in the first pages, among tens of others, (no byline, just “Globe and Mail”–hey, I was a nobody), but wholly altered. It was like a wee quilt, stitched together seamlessly, but not really encompassing the spirit of my review. You’d never have known though. They didn’t even use ellipses to denote the breaks from the narrative of the original.

Maybe I should have put quotes around “men” too… If I read more, I might know what to do here. Sigh. Alas, I don’t read, apparently, because I’m not being courted by the powers that be. Interesting article: definitely worth a thought, but perhaps sore for your head on Monday? Listen, come back tomorrow when you’re more rested and have stopped those burpy little dry heaves you’ve been getting since Sunday morning, the ones that taste like peach schnappes cut with turpentine. Once those are gone, you’re ready for serious critical thinking.

Men read. Tons of them do. But they are not marketed to, not targeted, and often totally dismissed. Go to a book conference, a signing. Outside of a Tucker Max event, what percentage of attendees are men?

I thought about this while watching the first television ad for the Barnes & Noble Nook. The ad itself, I think, is quite well done and effective. It tells a story, hits strong emotions. But notice something odd? It markets itself solely towards women. What about the Kindle? Amazon is a brilliant, juggernaut of a company, but the ads for Kindle with their twee music would make any guy groan. Why would men buy an e-reader, considering the takeaway from these ads is you can a) learn about your pregnancy after falling for Mr. Darcy, or b) become Amelia Earhart or Holly Golightly?

Now look at the ads for the iPad. Cool, right? They catch your attention without alienating half the consumer population. Why can’t we do that? Make a fun, cool campaign that doesn’t cut your audience off at the knees?

I’m tired of people saying Men Don’t Read. Men LOVE to read. I’ve been a reader my whole life. My father is a reader. Most of my male friends are readers. But the more publishing repeats the empty mantra that Men Don’t Read the less they’re going to try to appeal to men, which is where this vicious cycle begins.

Amazon has “blowout” quarter… Not as much C4 attached to this article as you might have liked, but still… it can’t all be explosions on a Monday

Styron family wins some from Random

BC Book prizes announced

Decision Points*, Wubblewoo memoir, to be released in fall…

Listen, any book that purports to investigate sex in Shakespeare but doesn’t explain in detail how they made out with those big fucking dog-cone collars on just isn’t doing it’s job, in my humble opinion

Charlie Orr’s Hypothetical Library, in which he imagines designs for books never written by authors he loves, continues apace, but with a guest designer today: kick-ass poet Jennifer Knox, who has taken the idea and run with it in an unexpected direction

* I hereby launch a campaign to redefine “decision points” as the sparkling dots of cocaine crystalized around an entitled fratboy’s nose immediately after receiving his bought degree from Yale.

Pure awesome—especially if not visual metaphor. From dvice.

Remember the story ages and ages ago (or days, I don’t know, this business is all running together for me) about that history prof’s wife who was doling out negative Amazon reviews to his competitors through sockpuppet accounts? Turns out it wasn’t even her, but him. Dude is a skuz-wad.

After threatening colleagues, literary journals and newspapers with legal action last week, Orlando Figes has revealed this morning that it was not his wife who anonymously rubbished fellow historians in comments on Amazon: it was him.

In a statement released to the Daily Mail the professor of history at London’s Birkbeck College said that he takes “full responsibility” for what he called “foolish errors”.

The story began when historians began to notice a series of reviews on the shopping site which praised Figes’s own books and attacked those of his colleagues. Comments posted under the alias “orlando-birkbeck” and “Historian” called Rachel Polonsky’s book Molotov’s Magic Lantern “hard to follow” and Robert Service’s history of communism, Comrades, “awful”, while praising Figes’s study of Soviet family life, The Whisperers as “a fascinating book … [that] leaves the reader awed, humbled, yet uplifted”.

Archie plans to introduce an openly gay character to the venerable comic, putting to lie the conventional wisdom that pretty much all of those guys were just desperately clinging to the inside of the closet door.

According to Archie Comic Publications, “Kevin Keller is the new hunk in town and Veronica just has to have him… Mayhem and hilarity ensue as Kevin desperately attempts to let Veronica down easy and her flirtations only become increasingly persistent.”

“The introduction of Kevin is just about keeping the world of Archie Comics current and inclusive,” Archie Comics co-CEO Jon Goldwater said in an online posting Thursday.

“Archie’s hometown of Riverdale has always been a safe world for everyone. It just makes sense to have an openly

People buying more games than books on iPhone, but three weeks later and 26% of Wired’s mobile traffic is the iPad…. Holy. Shit.

Moby keeps its solemn watchful eye on Amazon, which is apparently still making cash hand-over-iron-fist despite being locked in a life or death battle with… well… everybody

Can somebody throw the Boston public library system a frigging bone? They’re starting to look like a battered Curly caught between old Twofinger Larry and an Slappy Moe… Woop woop woop!

What odds on Hillary Mantel for the Orange?

In the face of all the cool pics of that angry Icelandic volcano called Elijahwoodfracturedhisskull, we have a call for more good volcano books

Google settlement judges suddenly gets promoted

Bunch of YA novelists tweet themselves (not as sexy as it sounds) in promotion of another YA novelist’s book. I wondered what that was all about…

Kids shortlists dominated by Neil Gaiman, who is reportedly administering wedgies to the other nominees behind the shop class where everyone smokes after school

WTF, BEA > LBF FUBAR? IDK & IDC

Canadians bringing Willie Shakes to comics

Aussie indy publishing sensation Salt has just posted this message via editor Chris Hamilton-Emory’s Facebook status:

We’ve just had terrible news: Salt has been the victim of a fraud and our entire bank account has been emptied. We’ve not a bean left. The bank is now investigating. Please bear with us while we try and stay afloat.

Bummer. Hope it works out for Salt or that this was just some kind of banking error.

The NYPL’s book sorting machine is the stuff of sociologists’ nightmares, but a technophile’s wet dream. (And presumably this makes it a sociologist-technophile’s wetmare.)

Here is how it works: On one side of the machine, which is two-thirds the length of a football field and encircled by a conveyor belt, staff members place each book face-down on a separate panel of the belt. The book passes under a laser scanner, which reads the bar code on the back cover, and the sorter communicates with the library’s central computer system to determine where the book should be headed. Then, as the conveyor belt moves along, it drops the book into one of 132 bins, each associated with a branch library. It’s sort of like a baggage carousel that knows which bag is yours and deposits it at your feet.

A few years ago, the Toronto Star went around interviewing writers they found slogging it out in cafe windows. Now they follow up, and the good news is, most of them “made it”. Of particular interest to the ‘Ninja is contributor Marianne Apostolides and blog pal Zoe Whittall, both of whom are enjoying well-earned success.

In 2006 we went to Toronto coffee shops looking for writers and asked them what they were working on. Harry Potter stories, you may remember, came to life in an Edinburgh café.

The little-known creators gazed up from their laptops or pages of longhand and told us about the novels, poems and blogs in progress. The Star ran excerpts.

What has happened to these aspiring artists and their work? A whole lot

A publisher asks: The $20,000 typo: would you pay for it? Her answer? No. A short piece, but a great question. If you had a typo like the one that appeared in the Penguin recipe book calling for “freshly ground black people”, would you pulp and reprint and great expense, or would you try to repair? Eds? Pubs?

In hearing this story, I decided to put on my would-be publisher hat and ask, “Would I have paid to reprint the books?”

The short answer is NO.

Author and ‘Ninja-friend Susannah Breslin writes about her experience of being plagiarized, most recently finding her short story for sale on iTunes by someone else. And at 99c.

This wasn’t the first time my fiction has been plagiarized or stolen. Two years ago, a young woman lifted another short story of mine, “She Is a Girl,” which appeared in Maisonneuve magazine and which I subsequently published on my blog. The woman, whose name is Courtney Greene, had published my story on her blog as if it were her own. Some 47 readers had given “her” story rave reviews in the comments. “You are a beautiful woman and this post is amazing,” one fawned. As it turned out, Ms. Greene had a history of online plagiarism. She had stolen accounts written by others of their experiences competing in Ironman triathalons and republished them on her blog as her own. After a reader alerted me to my work on her site, I contacted Greene. Not long after, I received an email from someone who claimed to be her assistant, stating that Greene was currently in a coma and someone must have hacked her blog. The post was deleted. Her blog went invitation-only. That was the end of that.

Until, of course, I discovered someone named Thu Ngan Bui had nicked “The Hardyman.” This time, not only had they stolen the story, but they were selling it. On iTunes. And not only were they selling my stolen story on iTunes, they were selling it for ninety-nine cents. Was that the going rate for 6,545 words of fiction in 2010? Not even a dollar?

One of Amazon’s biggest brick and mortar competitors to sell Kindle?

UK’s WHSmith blames non-fiction for sales slump

Oz’s top lit prize shortlist announced, but is it losing relevance?

Finalists for Canada’s young writers award announced (Ex-ninja K was a judge)

B&N.com partnering with Salon

Samuel Johnson longlist is global

Comics as ebooks

Danielle Steel’s assistant stole a million bucks, presumably from the change at the bottom of her purse

Yann being philosophical about bad reviews

Sarah Palin’s “speaking” contract riders

Andrew Wylie profiled at the Guardian.

Wylie, who has become the equal of the corporate players such as ICM, William Morris, Curtis Brown and United Agents through aggressive willpower, is not like them. He’s a lone wolf who has built his empire, from nothing, in less than 30 years. A late starter, at odds with his privileged background, he was always the formidably bright and assertive son of Boston aristocracy. The Wylies go back to the American Revolution. On his mother’s side, there was money and banking; on his father’s, books and publishing (Houghton Mifflin).

This complex dual inheritance took him to Harvard to study French literature and then, because he has a horror of boredom, to New York in the city’s death-rattle years during the 1970s. A would-be writer and journalist, he hung out with Andy Warhol, took drugs and wrote some terrible poetry, hustling a living as a cab driver until, just after his 30th birthday, he set up the Wylie Agency in a bleak little room downtown. His first client was the great American socialist IF (Izzy) Stone. “Once upon a time,” he says, “I had idle afternoons.” A wicked smile illuminates the pause for effect. “That’s not a problem any more.”

Publishing was in his blood but as a contrarian and a zealot, he was appalled by its complacent cosiness. “In those days,” he remembers, “the money went from the publisher to the agent to the author. Agents felt they were in business with the publishers and were somewhat condescending to the authors, who were treated as talented but dysfunctional. I thought about it and I decided: that’s corrupt. An agent is hired by an author. As the agent you are the gardener on the author’s estate. I think it was a significant realisation that I was working for the author and not the other way round.”

Dear Mr. Wylie, My grounds are in dire need of tending. Please arrive Monday with a spade and dumptruck of cash potting soil. Sincerely, George Murray, Esquire

The LBF says to the industry: “Don’t worry, things are FINE!” but it’s voice is not only cracking with stress, it’s also echoing down the empty corridors of heartache.

Attendance down

HAPPY FAMILY! HAPPY FAMILY!

Will Frankfurt make up for LBF

Well, as you know, while I was gone the e-shit hit the proverbial e-fan as a historian’s wife in the UK was outed as running down his competition in the Amazon reviews section. Sounds juicy. Here’s a few things I found on it when I got back, in case you haven’t seen them.

The Historian’s Wife (sounds like crappy novel title) plays literary hitman

More at the Guardian

Is this really a scandal?

Even the big guys are getting abandonned by their publicity teams these days, so everyone needs to know how to get on the Twitter and the Facebook and the Google.

“The media landscape has changed so much in the past two or three years” that the nature of authorship and book publishing needs to be rethought, Drake says.

He cites the “decline of local print media and the consolidation of TV and radio stations” and the revolutionary rise of digital media and networking sites such as Facebook.

Ben Laurro, founder of Pure Publicity, represents gospel singer Tina Cambpell, who’ll talk about her inspirational young-adult book, Be U: Be Honest, Be Beautiful, Be Intentional, Be Strong, Be You! at this weekend’s festival.

He says the priority today should be to find “new ways to market books” in an era when traditional venues such as book stores and libraries can’t generate enough publicity to justify marketing dollars.

“Facebook and Twitter have become powerful avenues to reach readers,” he says. “The media wasn’t the same as it was even two years ago . . . [and authors] need to realize that we need to reinvent the wheel.”

After two solid days spent in a fog-bound car on a moose-laden highway, I am finally back to a place from which I can blog. I am simultaneously relieved and disappointed. Here’s some news I missed Monday and Tuesday:

RIP: Carolyn Rodgers, poet, dead at 69

Universities banning iPads?

50 best moments of author-on-author linguistic violence

Ever had a whopper of a library late fine? Don’t worry, you’re in good company

Enough with the Who Wrote Shakespeare? crap

How can one company no one’s ever heard of produce as many titles in a year as the rest of the mainstream market combined?

Orange Prize shortlist not a shocker

Forbes’ list of richest characters

Glück hates NaPoMo schtick

Unproduced screenplays by intellectuals

You all undoubtedly heard about the Penguin cookbook in Oz that had a typo calling for “freshly ground black people” instead of pepper… well, apparently Penguin let someone with a mouth at the mic who called those upset by the mistake “small-minded” and now they’re backpedalling and pulping the whole thing

Latest on Oxford poet race

Best stoner novels of all time

Can digital resurrection save dead/dying print magazines?

Amazon’s day apparently not complete without major lawsuit or embarrassment … This is a textbook cry for help people… Amazon? Do you need a hug?

iPad mugging costs man a finger (warning: gross)

BC on the lookout for book-loving silver fox (and mobster/murderer) who looks like he might be dating your grandma

Do you think JK might run one day?

So, how does one pass the time at Riker’s Island? I mean, besides crafting cafeteria-tray shiv-turning kevlar?

There are some perks to being in Newfoundland (which is, if you look at it on a globe as opposed to a map, way THE FUCK out in the middle of the North Atlantic), but today being close to Iceland isn’t really one of them. I was scheduled to fly out from St. John’s this morning with all the hung over rock stars from the Junos, but turns out everything is grounded because of a change in the wind and the hacking cough of an unpronounceable volcano on some other frozen island.  Damn. So I am now waiting for a rental car to drive 8 hours across the island, presumably swerving around moose like it’s a slalom race, and tru da tickest fahg, so pray for mojo here. Will report in later if I makes it, b’y.

The novel is not dying. Would you fucking pundits please make up your minds? I’m sick of this back and forth. I can’t plan anything. Here Ian McEwan chats (somewhat ironically) on internet video with Tina Brown about how he’s not as worried about it all as Philip Roth is.

Not long ago, Philip Roth told Tina Brown that the novel will die out in the face of competition from “screens”—television, movies, computers. McEwan is more optimistic: “I think we will still need to examine the fine print of human behavior, human relationships,” he says. “So whether people are reading it on an iPad or an old-fashioned book doesn’t seem to be the real issue.”

Apparently, if you’re this lady. I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that if a life is so easily malleable by something innocuous as a book club, there is something seriously wrong with the way that life was being led before it found its ad hoc therapy group. But I’m cranky this morning. So perhaps not.

It was ten years ago and I was a new mum at the local school. My son bounced into the playground and made friends while I stood on the fringes wondering what the parent protocol might be and feeling slightly awkward. Conversations were eventually struck up, coffees drunk and then, after a few months, came an invitation. Would I like to join a book club?

It was like being in an Enid Blyton story; I was being asked to join a secret society. So I was flattered — and then worried. Book clubs presumably read books and I did not do that. Oh, I read my kind of book — the kind where the writer was dead and themes were deep — but I could not possibly read contemporary fiction.

“Do you read books by living authors?” I asked. Instead of retracting the offer the women rubbed their hands together, delighted with the challenge of converting me to modernity. I will admit that I accepted more as a chance to meet other mums than to broaden my literary horizons. I held out little hope of actually enjoying any of the books.
…
Book clubs are a cure for that sudden onset of depression. Instead of feeling lost upon finishing a captivating novel, you feel a buzz of anticipation. What did the rest of the gang make of it? You do not have to foist the book you have just enjoyed upon someone and have to wait for them to decide to read it. With a book club you know a group of people are reading it at the same time as you. They drop hints. The book is getting stodgy or it has picked up after a slow start or have you got to the part where the priest . . ? No, I won’t spoil it.

The show must go on, says vòlcáshno-füjked (it’s an Icelandic term) LBF folk

Donated book nets Oxfam big payday

Orwell Prize shortlist

Independent Foreign Fiction prize shortlist is all-the-hell over the place

West-Villagers angry about new yuppy bookshop don’t realize they’re yuppies

Why can’t we elect a poet to run our country instead of that shark-eyed religious zealot?

On books and rock and roll

The Atlantic looks at the perils of putting your trust in writing manuals. But how the hell else are you going advertise to the hot tomato over the next cafe table that you’re a “real writer” working on a “real book”?

With a frequency that is dismaying, I run into people who are widely versed in the manuals, and quasi-literate in all other ways. They have no sense of the love of the art they wish to practice, because they have very seldom or never been in the thrall of a work of fiction as practiced by the great artists in their own literary heritage, or even the good craftsmen in the genres. They may have had some exposure to the great writers, or some anthology-exposure to a fraction of someone, little pieces of the treasure that is there. Or their reading is so deficient that in fact the only books they’ve read that might be called fiction are the few best sellers that achieve some literary merit or cachet. Which is to say that these people, many of them college students, want to be considered serious writers; they seek literary excellence; but they have come to believe that they can accomplish this by means of the convenient shortcut. And the industry that produces the how-to manuals plays to them, makes money from their hope of finding a way to be a writer, rather than doing the work, rather than actually spending the time to absorb what is there in the vast riches of the world’s literature, and then crafting one’s own voice out of the myriad of voices.

My advice? Put the manuals and the how-to books away. Read the writers themselves, whose work and example are all you really need if you want to write. And wanting to write is so much more than a pose. To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the things that plague us most—suspicion and fear of the other, and the tendency to see whole groups of people as objects, as monoliths of one cultural stereotype or another—are defeated.

Small press author Paul Harding took the Pulitzer for fiction with Tinkers this week, and here is how it happened: good will and word of mouth. Got it [scrawls down note on palm of hand]: good pills and smack in the mouth.

The Penguin CEO says its key to keep the readers heaving their bosoms over emotionally invested in the throbbing manhood of their relationship with books. This is actually quite true, which is why we do cutesty things like the iPad’s book store that looks like it has wooden shelves instead of a list of titles. So, this fall, when you go to buy my new book, I want you to come with a speech prepared about how your going to support it and give it the life it’s become accustomed to.

People often compare the book industry to the music industry, where digital sales have overtaken sales of CDs, but there is an emotional connection to books, said Makinson, who studied English and history at Cambridge and began his career as a journalist.

“We need to keep the emphasis on the reader’s emotional relationship with the book. It’s still important to produce a well-designed, beautifully printed book that looks good on a shelf, and that you can gift to a friend,” he said.

Will Iceland’s volcanic eruptions interrupt the London Book Fair?

Self published titles outnumber traditional 3 to 1

Stephanie Meyers is a highly “challenged” author… Oh! That explains a lot for me…

Ted and Sylvia chat about their romance

Library of Congress to archive the narrative of your sad, lonely life

Tactile 3D erotica for the blind… Nice.

DFW’s list of words circled in his dictionary

Considered it BOOKMARKED! How to pick up a librarian!

Sad Sack Purchasing Screenwriting Software

If you haul your arse out of bed in time and/or convince your boss to change the dial from that station that plays all the Belinda Carlisle and Bananarama, you might tune in to me talking on Q about culture in my adoptive home of Newfoundland. I’m actually slightly nervous, more of the studio audience than the mic….

Sweet. Madre. Dios. Dear Internet, Thank you. I am done now and can go in peace. Sincerely, George (From Sean C’s FB feed)

You asked for it; you got it! These are the results of the 1992 Librarians and Sex Survey that Wilson Library Bulletin refused to run. They did run the initial survey questionnaire in the June ’92 issue in my “Facing the Public” column and then fired me and destroyed the unsold copies of the magazine. Over 5.000 librarians sent in their questionnaires to me. Here are the results:

(P.S. Respondents who fell into the 1% category of question #19, please get in touch.)

I don’t know, but something in my life is toxic to fiction, because the damn thing is always found floating belly up in my office. At first I thought it was the ph level in there or maybe my kids, but they all checked out as non-toxic (mostly), so it’s probably this stupid thing that’s plugged into my walls and eyeballs.

‘I’m not a Luddite,” says Kennedy, an award-winning fiction writer who lives on a cattle station in Victoria.

But she considers the internet’s constant flow of unprocessed information and chatter ”toxic to fiction”, which requires quiet, slow reflection by writers and readers. ”We’re decontextualising, pasting bits of other people’s work on our blogs and creating unoriginal mash-ups,” she said.

Kennedy limits herself to checking emails twice a day and saves up her internet research as if for an occasional library excursion.

Other writers find it harder to kick the habit. A well-known Australian writer told Kennedy he had installed the new ”Freedom” computer program, which locks the user out of the internet for a set time – ”like a compulsive gambler or an addict”.

Nah, that’s preposterous. There’s no way I would need a computer program to help me quit. I can quit any time I want. If I wanted to, I could just stop typing and walk away, cold turkey. Right now. If I wanted. Why? Because I’m NOT ADDICTED. GOT IT?! [Switches windows. Types: google.com then "Freedom computer program" -"Dick Cheney" +"help me escape this living hell" +"I have shakes already" and... um... "boobs"] DON’T LOOK AT ME!

Seems like a few feel-g00d articles about bookshops are popping up here and there to counter all the doom and gloom. Is there a chance for small niche stores to make a go of it in the big box/Amazon universe?

Good News

Return of radical booshops in UK

Local shop as nexus of community and place for human interaction… imagine

Bad News

The Apple iBooks shop sucks almost as much as iTunes

Canadian indy giant (?) McNally Robinson is pissed at the governemt for letting Amazon in

Reader Alexandra points to a program helping librarians make poetry successful with the grizzled, be-trenchcoated perverts patrons of their houses of filth and porn local branches.

“Poetry is most successful when your patrons hear it, see it, hear about it, bump into it, in as many ways as possible,” she said. “It will be unavoidable if you do a good job.”

The Poets House model guides librarians in collection development, creating book displays, and leading programs such as slams and writing workshops. “Once people start coming, they find something that is nourishing them,” said Howard, who noted that poetry circulation tripled at libraries that followed the Poets House model. “They will come back, and you will be rewarded by that.”

Howard also encouraged the librarians to raise not only their patrons’ awareness of poetry but the staff’s as well. She suggested starting meetings with a poem, for instance. The more staff members embraced poetry, the more successful the librarians’ efforts would be.

Are most female characters in crime novels “terrible cliches”? Why?

Bad things can happen when tough guy crime novelists write women. I’m hardly what anyone would call a tough guy, but I do have five thrillers to my name that were well received. That said, my perspective on the opposite sex is limited by my gender and more than a little skewed by the scads of poorly rendered female characters who pollute the genre I so love.

That which is formed of liquid news trapped in a cavity on your brain stem.

Bantam Dell merges with Ballantine… my 14-year-old sci-fi reading self would plotz

Roth gets Paris Review award

Poetry’s Ruth Lilly Prize ($100G!) goes to Eleanor Ross Taylor

Carl Rove nearly gets arrested by citizen at reading (video)

Pricing non-remaindered books like remainders makes God pull the whiskers off little kittens

All it takes is a glimpse of Marquez and you’re pumping out the award winning novels… I KNEW there was a better way than working hard

US group that provides free books to needy falls under funding shadow

Area Man Well-Versed In First Thirds of Great Literature